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Steve Jobs Dies: Apple Chief Created Personal Computer, iPad, iPod, iPhone

By NED POTTER (@NedPotterABC) and COLLEEN CURRY
Oct. 5, 2011

Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56.

Apple did not reveal where Jobs died or from what cause -- though he has endured a battle with pancreatic cancer in recent years.

"We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today," read a statement by Apple's board of directors. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts."

The homepage of Apple's website this evening switched to a full-page image of Jobs with the text, "Steve Jobs 1955-2011."

Clicking on the image revealed the additional text: "Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and, with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak, marketed what was considered the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.

Shortly after learning of Jobs' death, Wozniak told ABC News, "I'm shocked and disturbed."

Industry watchers called him a master innovator -- perhaps on a par with Thomas Edison -- changing the worlds of computing, recorded music and communications.

In 2004, he beat back an unusual form of pancreatic cancer, and in 2009 he was forced to get a liver transplant. After several years of failing health, Jobs announced on Aug. 24, 2011 that he was stepping down as Apple's chief executive.

"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know," Jobs wrote in his letter of resignation. "Unfortunately, that day has come."

One of the world's most famous CEOs, Jobs remained stubbornly private about his personal life, refusing interviews and shielding his wife and their children from public view.

"He's never been a media person," said industry analyst Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, after Jobs resigned. "He's granted interviews in the context of product launches, when it benefits Apple, but you never see him talk about himself."

The highlights of Jobs's career trajectory are well-known: a prodigy who dropped out of Reed College in Oregon and, at 21, started Apple with Wozniak in his parents' garage. He was a multimillionaire by 25, appeared on the cover of Time magazine at 26, and was ousted at Apple at age 30, in 1984.

In the years that followed, he went into other businesses, founding NeXT computers and, in 1986, buying the computer graphics arm of Lucasfilm, Ltd., which became Pixar Animation Studios.

He was described as an exacting and sometimes fearsome leader, ordering up and rejecting multiple versions of new products until the final version was just right. He said the design and aesthetics of a device were as important as the hardware and software inside.

In 1996, Apple, which had struggled without Jobs, brought him back by buying NeXT. He became CEO in 1997 and put the company on a remarkable upward path.

By 2001 the commercial music industry was on its knees because digital recordings, copied and shared online for free, made it unnecessary for millions of people to buy compact discs.

Jobs took advantage with the iPod -- essentially a pocket-sized computer hard drive with elegantly simple controls and a set of white earbuds so that one could listen to the hours of music one saved on it. He set up the iTunes online music store, and persuaded major recording labels to sell songs for 99 cents each. No longer did people have to go out and buy a CD if they liked one song from it. They bought a digital file and stored it in their iPod.

In 2007, he transformed the cell phone. Apple's iPhone, with its iconic touch screen, was a handheld computer, music player, messaging device, digital wallet and -- almost incidentally -- cell phone. Major competitors, such as BlackBerry, Nokia and Motorola, struggled after it appeared.

By 2010, Apple's new iPad began to cannibalize its original business, the personal computer. The iPad was a sleek tablet computer with a touch screen and almost no physical buttons. It could be used for almost anything software designers could conceive, from watching movies to taking pictures to leafing through a virtual book.

Personal Life

Jobs kept a close cadre of friends, Bajarin said, including John Lasseter of Pixar and Larry Ellison of Oracle, but beyond that, shared very little of his personal life with anyone.

But that personal life -- he was given up at birth for adoption, had an illegitimate child, was romantically linked with movie stars -- was full of intrigue for his fan base and Apple consumers.

Jobs and his wife, Laurene Powell, were married in a small ceremony in Yosemite National Park in 1991, lived in Woodside, Calif., and had three children: Reed Paul, Erin Sienna and Eve.

He admitted that when he was 23, he had a child out of wedlock with his high school girlfriend, Chris Ann Brennan. Their daughter, Lisa Brennan Jobs, was born in 1978.

He had a biological sister, Mona Simpson, the author of such well-known books as "Anywhere But Here." But he did not meet Simpson until they were adults and he was seeking out his birth parents. Simpson later wrote a book based on their relationship. She called it "A Regular Guy."

Fortune magazine reported that Jobs denied paternity of Lisa for years, at one point swearing in a court document that he was infertile and could not have children. According to the report, Chris Ann Brennan collected welfare for a time to support the child until Jobs later acknowledged Lisa as his daughter.

There were other personal details that emerged over the years, as well.

At Reed, Jobs became romantically involved with the singer Joan Baez, according to Elizabeth Holmes, a friend and classmate. In "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs," Holmes tells biographer Alan Deutschman that Jobs broke up with his serious girlfriend to "begin an affair with the charismatic singer-activist." Holmes confirmed the details to ABC News.

Jobs' Health and Apple's Health

Enigmatic and charismatic, Jobs said little about himself. But then his body began to fail him.

In 2004, he was forced to say publicly he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer. In 2009, it was revealed that he had quietly gone to a Memphis hospital for a liver transplant.

He took three medical leaves from Apple. He did not share details.

In 2009, sources said, members of Apple's board of directors had to persuade him to disclose more about his health as "a fiduciary issue," interwoven with the health of the company.

He was listed in March as 109th on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires, with a net worth of about $8.3 billion. After selling Pixar animation studios to The Walt Disney Company in 2006, he became a Disney board member and the company's largest shareholder. Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

Analysts said Apple performed well during Jobs' absence, partly because he was available for big decisions and partly because his chief lieutenant, Tim Cook, was the hands-on manager even when Jobs was there.

The company has a history of bouncing back. In January 2009, after he announced his second medical leave, Apple stock dropped to $78.20 per share. But it quickly recovered and became one of the most successful stocks on Wall Street. On one day in the summer of 2011, with the stock hitting the $400 level, Apple briefly passed ExxonMobil as the world's most valuable company.

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quote: Brad Miller

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Case in point, Edison is the reason every one of us is here! Only a fraction of the group is here due to Jobs...

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quote: Brad Miller

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Personally I cannot stand it when "style" gets in the way of productivity, but the success of Apple clearly proves that is what sells and Jobs' vision was dead on target. Full credit must be given to the man for knowing his audience.

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Case in point, Edison is the reason every one of us is here! Only a fraction of the group is here due to Jobs...
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To be fair, we are a rather self-selecting group. If this was a Final Cut Pro users' forum, you could possibly reverse that statement (except that the latter would still find Edison's legacy in consumer power supply and electric lighting useful).

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quote: Martin McCaffery

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For a good pop history of Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse read "Empires of Light". Edison was a pig, Tesla crazy and Westinghouse surprisingly decent.

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Mark Essig's Edison and the Electric Chair makes for compelling, if somewhat gruesome reading as well, with all the batshit craziness you can eat. He was encouraging the development of an AC-powered Old Sparky as a kind of reverse advert for Westinghouse as early as the late 1880s, and Topsy's eventual demise in 1903 was effectively the culmination of that campaign.
 

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Posted by Greg Anderson (Member # 235) on 10-06-2011, 12:35 PM:
 
Can you just listen to yourselves for a moment? Steve Jobs hasn't even been dead for a whole day and we're already saying, "Well, he wasn't that great." And what gives us the credibility to rip on Steve Jobs? His success is obvious to the whole world. My success isn't nearly as visible. Now isn't the time for me to try to convince anyone that I'm smarter/happier/nicer/more sane than Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, etc. Get over yourselves.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-06-2011, 12:41 PM:
 
I think the complaints are more about the coverage than the person.
 

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Posted by Dustin Mitchell (Member # 372) on 10-06-2011, 01:57 PM:
 
Once again, The Onion nails it

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CUPERTINO, CA—Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. "This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over." Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn’t have the slightest notion what he’s doing anymore.

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quote: Greg Anderson

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Can you just listen to yourselves for a moment?

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quote: Greg Anderson

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And what gives us the credibility to rip on Steve Jobs?

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quote: Greg Anderson

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Now isn't the time for me to try to convince anyone that I'm smarter/happier/nicer/more sane than Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, etc

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I think Edison and Westinghouse are fair game by now.

And for the record, I'm with you on holding back any negative comments on the guy since he just passed. I just mainly took issue with the implication that anyone who made a comment did so without thinking about it.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 10-06-2011, 04:22 PM:
 
Did the US Congress pass an amendment to the Constitution declaring it against the law to say anything less than 100% ass-kissing praise when it concerns Steve Jobs and Apple computer?

Yes, I think it's sad Steve Jobs died. I wouldn't wish pancreatic cancer on my worst enemy. The computer industry on the whole will suffer without the guy.

However, the epidemic level of Jobs worship presently on display really ought to be put into proper perspective. The dude isn't God. And he sure as hell isn't the only computer industry person to come up with a good idea, or even the only Apple computer employee to come up with a good idea. Does the name Jean-Louis Gassée ring a bell with any of them? The press (the vast majority of which are Apple users) give Jobs the credit for everything. That isn't right.

quote: Mark Ogden

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No one reading this will achieve even 1/1000th of his success, or bring about the technological or social change that he and his company did.

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Nice angry sounding insult there. Yes, every person including you, Mark has a meaningless, insignificant, life wasting job of no consequence. We all need to hang our heads in bitter defeat go home and hang ourselves in a hall closet for being something other than Steve Jobs.


I agree The Onion truly nailed it.
 

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Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 10-06-2011, 05:14 PM:
 
I'll keep it simple, and up front say that Steve Jobs has been one of my biggest inspirations.

-The media is over doing it.
-Love him or hate him, he was extremely significant in the tech world and generally popular with many normal people too.
-The Onion nailed it.
-I think the comparison to Edison is valid: both men are kind of larger than life and have inspired many many people. A hundred years from now, people will still remember and be talking about Steve Jobs.
-America has lost a great CEO, innovator, and visionary leader. There are many companies that it would behoove to follow some of his examples. All one needs to do to realize that is look at what Steve Balmer has done to Microsoft.

There's a great article in the Washington Post today that really summed it up best:

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Steve Jobs and the idea of letting go

By Hank Stuever, Published: October 5

Remember a few years ago, when your Apple store on any given Saturday afternoon ceased being the clean, technological zendo you once admired — the place you bought your iMac — and instead became a crowded bazaar of idealized wonder and hopeless waits at the Genius Bar?

The movement spread. People built their lives around the objects Steve Jobs gave them: the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. What happened with Jobs and Apple over the past decade is one of the rare participatory phenomena of our disconnected and no-longer-common culture. It was as if this generation’s defining event took place in a shopping plaza and then up in the “cloud,” and this time everyone (that is, everyone who could afford Apple products) got to go to Woodstock.

People stopped lining up for concert tickets and started lining up for new phones. This was the future right in front of you. It was sleek, responding to your touch. Imagine explaining an iPad to someone from 1984. They might get it, they might not.

Jobs died Wednesday at age 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer that his wasting form came to wear as familiarly as his preference for outdated jeans and black turtlenecks. When news of his death broke around 7:30 p.m. on the East Coast, a good number of us sought immediate solace (to say nothing of information) from our Apple stuff. The rippling tweets and shares fanned outward.

Swipe, swipe, touch. The nighttime news anchors, fearful of the obsolescence that dogs them at every turn, turned to ­social-media feeds for confirmation of a shared sense of loss; they invited hipster tech writers and thinkers who scorn old-media ways to make themselves available to grieve analytically on the air. (The digital air, that is; in Jobs’s world, we sacrificed the broadcast band to the broadband.) You can easily imagine newspaper assignment desks, similarly afflicted with professional hypochondria, scrambling reporters to Apple stores to gather quotes from the bereaved.

That is what Steve Jobs gave us: the future. A sense of ourselves moving forward into this century, which has proved especially hard to do, with its lack of employment opportunities and its addiction to panic. He gave us a look at the future and all the ambivalence and worry that comes with it. It was the most elegant form of social disruption, and now your kids won’t glance up from their iPhones. They’ll never need to.

We spend a lot of time wishing for the past, carping about our gizmos and the sway they lord over us, while loading up our iPods with songs that were popular when we were in high school, while stalking old boyfriends on Facebook. That in itself is a pleasant form of grief, but it is grief all the same.

Jobs kept nudging us away from that. Under his leadership, Apple’s subliminal selling point was: Let it go. Let go of the uneasiness about computers. Let go of ugly, antique technology. Let go of the fantasy future of personal rocketships. Let go of the expensive, shiny new phone that you bought last year for the slightly less expensive, shiny new phone that’s coming out this year. But let go of something deeper, something resistant in you that romanticizes the past.

In 2011, so much of our culture — as well as our politics — feels as though we’re losing grip on the old, beloved things. Where did record stores go? What happened to letters that come in the mail? Where did movie theaters go? What about the books? Where is my Main Street? Where is my America?

Jobs had been teaching us to say goodbye to all that for decades — we just didn’t know it. Some of us said goodbye to typewriters in the 1980s when we finished term papers using MacWrite on a Macintosh Plus for the first time. Some of us said goodbye when we made PTA fliers and “Lost Dog” posters that were far and away better than their Sharpie-scrawled predecessors. Let it go, let it go: Take your CDs to Goodwill; give your books to the library sale.

It was therefore an irresistible metaphor, in these final years, when the auditorium lights would go down and the crowd would go wild for Jobs, who increasingly greeted his followers and touted the latest neat, new thing even as he wore the look of a person who was not going into that future with us. He would be getting off here; we were to proceed without him into the unknown. Let it go and look ahead was the message all along.

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AJG
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-06-2011, 09:22 PM:
 
Wow, gotta hand it to TNT, they dug up and put on The Pirates of Silicone Valley tonight. And it is as bad as I remember.
 

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Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 10-07-2011, 01:04 AM:
 
Guilty pleasure movie.

AJG
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 10-07-2011, 03:28 AM:
 
<sarcastic remark, not intended to be taken seriously>
Even though I never bought any of his products, one thing I'm profoundly grateful to Steve Jobs for is having kicked Foxy Knoxy out of the headlines. It seems a pity that he had to pass away in order to achieve that, though...
</sarcasm>
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-07-2011, 08:11 AM:
 

quote: Aaron Garman

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Guilty pleasure movie.

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quote: Justin Hamaker

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Had the music industry been more on top of this trend, they could have trained consumers to buy buy music.

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I disagree. Even if Steve Jobs, or the music industry itself had invented legal downloads, you'd still see a big majority of the music being stolen once the "get it free" model was discovered.

Not trying to cast a negative light on Steve by any means; he was a genius and worthy of honor, but save the music industry? No. The concert industry is saving music, if anything.
 

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 10-08-2011, 08:08 PM:
 
Mike, I'm not trying to say Steve Jobs or iTunes saved the music industry. What I'm saying is the music industry made a huge mistake by not recognizing consumer demand for digital music, and creating the market, around the time they were going after Napster. Instead, they tried to hang on to what they had as if it was the only workable model. And then they further screwed up by suing regular people for "damages" from downloading.

Had the music industry been more proactive, they would have recognized the new market and exploited it at a time when the average music consumer still didn't know about "free" music from Napster. In fact, they could have even used Napster's users to develop the market.

Whether this would have changes anything about the attitude of today's consumer may be debatable, but the music industry should have been on the leading edge of digital music rather than trying to keep it from happening.

And this is where Steve Jobs really deserves the credit for his contribution to the music industry. He recognized a huge opportunity to seize, and develop, an emerging market which was being ignored.

For better or worse, Jobs changed the way music is distributed and purchased. He also created a viable way for independent artists to get their music to market without using a label.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 10-09-2011, 12:50 AM:
 
I'm sorry but "that dog don't hunt."

Putting it bluntly much of the general public is THIEVING LITTLE SHITHEADS. If there is any way for anyone to get something for nothing or at a price a lot cheaper than normal they will immediately gravitate to it. And they will do so regardless of the big picture consequences. This is a major reason why the United States is basically stuck in a death spiral of race to the bottom economics. Our people don't want to pay a damned thing to be able to sustain anything. Period. In the end, we will have only ourselves to blame. Not some stupid politician or other external factor. Just ourselves.

The American people are largely to blame for the failures of the music industry over the last decade. The American people buy shitty, uninteresting, derivative products that could only please a country club member board room executive. And the American people won't even pay the money necessary to sustain what has become a very shitty product. The movie industry would be in the very same position only if it was just as easy to download a movie for nothing as it is a pop tune.

The iPod and Apple brand worship fashion has provided a limited revenue stream to the music industry. But the music industry is a shadow of its former self. Other retail industries are set to fall through this sort of change. Do you enjoy having local TV stations? Enjoy them while you can. I don't think we're far off from seeing many of them fail just like local newspapers are failing.
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-09-2011, 03:04 AM:
 
Money is only valuable because we insist that it is. It always humors me that everyone cares so damn much about it, as if the world will stop spinning without it.
 

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Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 10-09-2011, 03:20 AM:
 
What Joe said.

AJG
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 10-09-2011, 09:08 AM:
 
Hear hear!
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 10-09-2011, 08:38 PM:
 
You guys don't care about your money? Just send it all to me if you don't want it.
 

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Posted by Ian Parfrey (Member # 5122) on 10-09-2011, 10:09 PM:
 
Not sure if this is relevant, but I like to do what I do NOT because of the money, because as we all know there ain't no money to be made in exhibition anymore, but because I LOVE doing what I do- and that is projecting film- ideally at a drive in.

I don't care about the money and no longer will.

Trouble is, my bank DOES.

Cue GFC Mk. II
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-09-2011, 10:32 PM:
 
Your bank does, your mortgage company does (if you have one), your insurance companies do, your other utilities and the like do, etc etc etc.

Just imagine working for one of those places. People would ask you what you do for a living. You're reply would be "I deal with money". Wow. Way to make a difference in the world. Way to make it a more enjoyable place to be. You really matter!

The fact is, humans have made money more important than human life. It is the #1 thing most people care about mainly because it is the #1 thing everyone else cares about. Without it, people other than your closest friends and family don't want to have anything to do with you. Once you have more than an average amount of it, then suddenly everyone wants to be your "friend". That's why I'm friends with Brad Miller and I've gotten 3 private jets out of the deal!
 

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